Second CRU inquiry reports

The Oxburgh report on the science done at the CRU has now been published and….. as in the first inquiry, they find no scientific misconduct, no impropriety and no tailoring of the results to a preconceived agenda, though they do suggest more statisticians should have been involved. They have also some choice words to describe the critics.

One wonders how the report was able to conclude that the methods used at CRU were appropriate and did not involved cherry picking or manipulation when, from reading the report, there seems to be few records of how a lot of the analysis was done.

It seems the only sticking point that remains is the lack of notes / inability to recall exactly how the raw data was treated to come up with the working data set. Perhaps if that was more transparent the critics would seem less credible?

“One wonders how the report was able to conclude that the methods used at CRU were appropriate and did not involved cherry picking or manipulation when, from reading the report, there seems to be few records of how a lot of the analysis was done.”

One wonders why someone would assume that being somewhat disorganized becasue of organic growth of the CRU program is the same as having few records.

Paul in #3 asks how the report was able to conclude that the methods used at the CRU were appropriate and did not involve cherry picking or manipulation. The answer is simple, and is on the first page of the report. The Committee members READ THE PAPERS PUBLISHED BY THE CRU. Try it sometime.

Take care that you summarise such an important report accurately :
“We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians,” the panel remarked in its conclusions.
This is not quite reflected in your summary….

[Response: Watch those goalposts move! Let me be sure that I have your position correct: all of the noise, insults, threats, libel and cries of fraud, fabrication and misconduct are because you feel that more statisticians should have been coauthors on the CRU papers? Got it. – gavin]

As the Report urges bringing statisticians in more, it might be timely to point out the longstanding American Statistical Association public position on changes in climate, and see if any other statistical associations (is there one in the UK?) have stated positions?http://magazine.amstat.org/2010/03/climatemar10/

A bit off topic but I’m hoping you all are keeping up with this as well:

forward:

Hi All,

Well you did not hear from us for weeks while we spent most of the time preparing for the upcoming Climate Summit. Now we are in more frequent touch. So if we are ‘bugging’ any of you, please feel free to reply with an Unsubscribe in the subject line.

In a few hours MIT will open up the custom portal they have created for The Climate Summit into the Climate Collaboratorium (CC). When that happens I will post a link on our website’s home page and will send you one more short email to put the link in your hands.

We would like to ask you all to engage energetically in this project. It is a win-win-win situation for us all to do so. The CC website will engage you in responding to a series of debates with a variety of positions. I will attach a document from which these debates are being constructed. Reading this attachment will prime you for these debates online. Engaging in these debates will provide input to The Climate Summit for this Friday, April 16th.

As always, I thank you so much for your participation with us on The Climate Summit project, and please do tell some friends!

How can education motivate humanity to respond proactively to climate change?
– Position: Make primary and secondary education central, to build awareness among the young
– Position: Emphasize university-based education, due to the complexity of climate science and environmental economics
– Position: Adult education, both formal and informal
– Position: Education is a handmaiden to political and economic power and the problem must be addressing by working in those domains

Role of religion and faith: Do religion and faith have a role in motivating humanity to respond proactively to climate change?
– Position: Religion and faith have a central role
– Position: Religion and faith are not important in this domain, which is the province of science and economics

How might a proactive response to climate change be inhibited?
– Position: Raise questions about climate science
– Position: Emphasize high costs of action
– Position: Point out other pressing needs, such as global development

Category: Policy approaches
What government policies should be adopted to address climate change?
– Position: International agreement on emissions reductions/land use
– Position: Cap and trade or carbon tax for nations or large regional blocs (such as European Union)
– National/regional subsidies for green technology
– State/provincial or city/metro region climate plans
– None

One of the simple points made by the panel is that “at a global and hemispheric scale temperature results are surprisingly insensitive to adjustments made to the data and the number of series included.”

Actually, this isn’t surprising at all. This is obvious to anyone with even the most basic grasp of statistics and the dynamically determined spatial scale of climate variability.

re 10 ; Not my position Gavin, dont be so sensitive. The report has some very sensible comments which should not be discarded in the general ‘its all fine, we told you so’generalities. Its a good time to have a less arrogant approach, appreciate that everyone can learn lessons, and then move forward stronger for the experience.

I’d be quite happy for CRU to be given more money so it can employ professional statisticians, and also maybe an archivist and other support staff. The report states “we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal”. Overall, it paints a picture of CRU as under-resourced and under-staffed, but still producing sound results despite that.

Re Paul Gosling @14, on the contrary, the paper and its supporting documents will tell you everything you need to know to replicate the authors work, providing you are capable of designing your own code and scripts so that you are not merely duplicating their work, which would be pointless.

#23 said: “A SCIENCE PAPER tells you enough to get on and do your own damn work to see if you can see the same effect.”

If only that were true, we wouldn’t have this mess.

[Response: That is unfortunately hopelessly naive. Take the GISTEMP product – all data, all code, all papers describing the methods are online. It has been independently verified that the code does exactly what it is supposed to do. There can be no-one who will seriously argue that this is not reproducible or replicable under any definition you choose. The results from it are robust and other analyses of the raw data and methodologies to correct for UHI have shown no significant difference. Yet there are still hour long TV specials being made accusing the agency and the scientists of fraud and misconduct related to this specific product. How is it possible to be more open or do more to show ‘the workings’? And yet the attacks continue. Why might that be? Clue: the attacks have nothing to do with the scientific need for replication or openness. – gavin]

Very sound and considered responses especialy to the retort by the interviewer: “Hang on, there weren’t any climate skeptics on the panel”.., to which he replied (paraphrasing) that the interviewer would have to ask the other members of the panel for their specific views on climate change, but their role was not to consider climate change itself, but to address issues of the CRU’s science in relation to the allegations; the panel were confident that this (the science) had been done honestly and reliably….

..and concerning the allegations that lead to the enquiry, Oxborough stated (I’m paraphrasing) “…we addressed a very large number of criticisms, some of them pretty slanderous…”

“With very noisy data sets a great deal of judgement has to be used. Decisions
have to be made on whether to omit pieces of data that appear to be aberrant.
These are all matters of experience and judgement. The potential for
misleading results arising from selection bias is very great in this area. It is
regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this
work because it is fundamentally statistical.”

It’s as well that decisions that affect most economies of the western
world aren’t based on this work then!

Ah, but a clever man would have spent many years reading papers, slowly building up a tolerance to them, so that it would not matter which papers he read, and so he would be able to safely ignore any sort of truth forced up on him.

You may now proceed to the fireswamp, where you will encounter Anomalies of Unusual Size.

From #20 Paul A. I cant disagree with this.
:The report states “we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal”. Overall, it paints a picture of CRU as under-resourced and under-staffed, but still producing sound results despite that.
BUT,how does this provide any sound basis for supporting future policy decisions affecting billions of people and likely costing billions of dollars?
Its nonsensical…

I would like to see a panel convened which will take the contrarians to task for their false and libelous claims made against CRU and others. Would it not be nice to see McIntyre and others cross-examined and have their true colours revealed?

Great news, but hardly surprising. And not a whitewash, there was some justified critique.

Did the denialsits really/honestly in their hearts of hearts think they had a legitimate and convincing case?

The very brevity of this report speaks volumes about how little substance there ever was to this “scandal.”.

On the other hand, the seemingly limitless horizons of hyperbole explored by such as Glenn Beck and George Monbiot and then eagerly reported throughout the popular media says even more about how gullible, easily manipulated and incapable of exerting critical thinking skills our so-called “thought leaders” have become.

Now Beck is obviously a hopeless case but Monbiot could still largely salvage his reputation with a contrite and unqualified apology for his remarks about Phil Jones. Come on, George, you can gag it up. A few moments of pain and it’ll all be over.

@all climate scientists
“…it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.”

How common is it for climate researchers to collaborate closely with professional staticians?
I know that, i.e. in astronomy, it is not uncommon for the names of professional staticians to appear next to their astronomer colleagues in peer reviewed papers. Is this the exception rather than the rule in climate research? Even if the paper is heavily dependent on statistics for its conclusions?

Do you think such a close collaboration is necessary? Or are most climate researchers already sufficiently proficient staticians?

It’s as well that decisions that affect most economies of the western
world aren’t based on this work then!

And of course there was never the possibility that decisions of such magnitude would be taken from work produced by a microscopic research unit. Instead, we’re making those decisions based on the work of thousands of researchers working in a vast variety of fields of inquiry who have produced largely inadvertently a coherent, self-consistent, highly robust and highly confident overarching conclusion about what we’re doing to the planet and how we’re doing it, thus implying some possible course of action to fix the problem.

Re: 37;
Yes, Mr. Monbiot, especially considering your often worthwhile writings pre-Jones, and considering that I, too, was highly critical (and I think now very unfairly so) of Dr. Jones, and now feel he deserves a break on this issue…how about a bit of backing up and giving the real story an airing. And…the real story is that there really wasn’t a story, other than an attempt by some unethical scoundrels to scuttle the reputation of climate scientists.
I have a second also to another idea proposed above: how about CNN and MSNBC do a thorough ‘airing’ of the McIntyres of the world with the same fervor and scrutiny that they put legit scientist through? (Well, maybe the scrutiny is suspect)..
Third thought: does Mr. Gosling have any clue how, uh, how can I put this politely, un-thought-through the comment about research papers was? Others have pointed this out with some humor (and a bit of bite); my point is that that sort of argumentation (that we don’t know what is going on behind the papers, hence can’t trust them) shows a basic lack of understanding of what these papers are and how they are generated, peer-reviewed etc. Indeed, if you mistrust all papers of this sort, perhaps you should resort to a bit of tea leave analysis, or haruspicate instead.

Moving goalposts? This is a game? Surely the research group should have been expected, in retrospect, to have been in collaboration with experts in areas that were outside their own expertise. Their dismissal of McIntyre, as an example, was hardly laudatory, or was it? It’s hardly a damning report, if that’s the “victory” or “defeat” some had in mind, but it’s a useful one and a learning tool, I would hope, for the researchers. It has certainly been a good education for the public for these e-mails to have come out and for the various committees to have responded to them. The alternative seems worse: no e-mails and we’d still be debating rather encouraging transparency.

#26 – Here are more of Prof Hand’s comments as quoted by the Telegraph:

“The particular technique they used exaggerated the size of the blade at the end of the hockey stick. Had they used an appropriate technique the size of the blade of the hockey stick would have been smaller. The change in temperature is not as great over the 20th century compared to the past as suggested by the Mann paper.”

This appears to suggest that Hand’s contention is that the original MBH graph exaggerated 20th century rise with respect to the period immediately preceding it (i.e. end of the 19th century). Since the instrumental record was used for the end of the blade, I find this statement somewhat baffling.

The reporter also paraphrases Hand as follows:

“He said the graph, that showed global temperature records going back 1,000 years, was exaggerated – although any reproduction using improved techniques is likely to also show a sharp rise in global warming.”

It’s not clear from this whether Hand understands that MBH looked at northern hemisphere only or whether that is the reporter’s misinterpretation.

It’s all very well to state that statisticians should be more involved in climate studies, but Hand’s comments demonstrate that it’s very difficult to get them up to speed on the real issues, if they have no previous relevant scientific experience.

And as far as I can see there is little difference in the 20th century rise in Mann et al 2008 vs MBH 1999.

This is stupid. Statistics are a tool of the trade. Any scientific worker learns the statistical analysis procedures that he/she needs for his/her specific line of enquiry. A good grounding in basic statistical procedures is even taught at undergraduate level. Is there any suggestion that the statistical methods used at the CRU were inadequate to the task?

I stand to be corrected, have not read the report yet, but going by what I have been reading on the web thus far the answer to your question @48 is a definitive No, there is no suggestion that the methods were inadequate.

That is not surprising given that the HadCRUT SAT record has been replicated by many (including skeptics), and has also been corroborated by independent data observation platforms (RATPAC and MSU data).